This last year was one of magic and challenge. Watching the Tree of Life healing workshops begin to unfold at grass roots where people with scant resources began to take up the role of healing their communities. Seeing the integrity and self respect that allows people to carry the responsibility of this healing without reward or recognition. And it has been hard, and many have had to give up – but there has been this strange sense of knowing that ‘we can be better than this – wider than this’.

I have found it both inspiring and hard to watch.

But harder to watch, has been the edge where funder and grassroots activist meet. (The first world and the third world?/ old thinking and new thinking?). The world of checks and balances, of project proposals and programmes, and promises, and signed agreements and collecting receipts for the bus fare to town for the woman who was recently raped. The world of black and white, right and wrong, operating at the slow pace of the last person who has been on holiday, and has had a week to recover.

And seeing what happens to the people working in the  risky places living on a few hundred US$ a month or less – and who are made to wait two and a half months on a three month contract before any payment is made. Who have to leave their accommodation, and take their children out of school, but who carry on going.

This relationship is made all the more unbalanced because it is delivered as a gift from the knowing to the unknowing, from the benevolent to the victims. It is not support for the work of the warriors for peace.

There is no dignity in this!

Walking the grey clouds, wondering where  these two worlds meet.

And then towards the end of this year we began to be touched by magic – when amazing individuals acted with love and trust – and we were held in place by their contributions – and we made it through – to another place where we may get funding.  We are blessed.

Magic doesn’t fit in boxes
it streams in clouds

flowing with our dreams
not  our control

it is not held in place by our rules and regulations
but in  the trust of our common intentions

a place without boundaries
in a web of shared resources

living in a moment
- never re-gathered
soaring  the edges
on outspread wings

magic doesn’t fit in boxes
it comes from circles of love

Below is a comment from The Guardian Weekly (12/3/10). It reminded me of Delta Ndou’s blog about Zuma being called a buffoon by the British media.

“How do Zulus explain polygamy?” the BBC website asked in a piece at the end of last week’s coverage of the South African president’s state visit to Britain. There are many more serious concerns about Jacob Zuma’s rule beside his domestic arrangements, and many more important issues for the British and South African governments to discuss. He has said deeply unpleasant things about women and Aids. It is right to criticize him for this. But that does not wholly explain last week’s media fascination with polygamy. There is an undertone of imperial snobbishness about it as well, the mockery of a visiting president exposing a British national weakness for thinking of foreign leaders in the most simplistic, comic-book terms.

African leaders seem particularly prone to this stereotyping. Nelson Mandela can do no wrong in British eyes, just as President Zuma can now do no good – South Africa’s saint giving way to its sinner. Idi Amin, who got his own state visit in the 1970s, was thought a buffoon by the press before he was declared a butcher. Robert Mugabe experienced a similar slide. Britain’s closer neighbours suffer too. President Sarkozy’s state visit in 2008 was dominated by excitement over the tight outfits worn by his wife Carla Bruni. Silvio Berlusconi is routinely laughed at in the press as an ageing Italian lothario, which takes away from the much more serious harm his rule does to his country. Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is seen as a tough guy. Most other world leaders, even Germany’s Angela Merkel, lacking any easy definition, are largely ignored.

What Zuma makes of the reporting of his several marriages is unknown. A tough politician, he has doled out as many insults as he has taken. Before leaving for Britain he told a South African paper that “when the British came to our country they said everything we did was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in what-ever way”. That is a reasonable point about an empire whose relics linger on in the imperial coaches and plumed hats dusted off before state visits. The absurdity runs both ways in this affair.

Allow me to share with you a statement from one of my favourite authors, Anne Bronte, one of the first feminist writers. It reads “Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways”. Ironically the statement was scribbled in her prayer book and one would wonder how such a statement got into a prayer book.  This shows that even in those early times there were strong women who saw that there were many mistakes being made by society that needed to be changed.

Anne wrote her works in the 1840s, a period known as the Victorian era when women were so disempowered. In her novel “The Tenant Wildfell Hall”, Anne questions the societal values and beliefs that gave men so much power over women. The novel portrays Helen’s eloquent struggle for independence at a time when the law and society defined a married woman as her husband’s property. Women were married off at very tender ages to “rich” men. During this period, wealth was highly regarded and women would scramble to get married to rich men. Parents also played a major role in arranging suitors for their children. This probably is what made Anne “Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways”. Anne never married. She died at 29, already labelled a spinster. She also wrote her works under a pseudonym “Action Bell” because women were not allowed to work and her books were published after her death.

As I read through the novel. I could not help reflecting on the life we are leading these days. Is history repeating itself? Will we ever get to the stage where we can totally empower the girl child? These are some of the questions that ran through my mind.  At least we’ve passed the stage where women were not allowed to work, where women were confined to the home; a stage where women were numbered amongst men’s property. I salute women’s rights activist organizations that are working tirelessly in empowering women.

My fear though is that history might be repeating itself in another form. I get very worried with the age at which girl children are getting married. I read an article in The Herald where parents gave away a fourteen year old virgin as compensation for her older sister who gave birth just before her marriage. The suitor intended to marry the elder sister but upon discovering that she was already pregnant by another man, parents offered the younger sister as compensation. Parents have also adopted a carefree attitude towards marriage. They are accepting lobola as a “bribe”if their daughter is impregnated while she is below 16 so that they will not report the matter to the police even though the law says that having sex with a girl under the age of 16 is a crime.

Also, the topical issue these days are about some religious sects that are forcing young girls into marriage under the guise of the Holy Spirit. Are we going back to Anne’s era where girls and women are numbered among men’s property? Have we become so obsessed with marriage to the extent that we accept any suitor as long as that person is able to pay whatever bride price we ask for? Or has religion become a marriage ground where elders can just decide to offer girls to any man of their choice.

The death threats? Too numerous to count. The serious attempts on his life ranged from make-believe doctors offering potentially fatal “medicine” to a traffic accident that was no accident at all. In his native Zimbabwe, Chenjerai Hove has been ranked as high as No. 17 on the government’s Enemies of the State list. Read more

It has become normal in Zimbabwe to find two organizations doing the same business, and sharing the name but then suffixed somehow with another word to mark a difference. For example, ‘MDC T’, ‘MDC M’, ‘ZINASU Magwini’, ‘ZINASU Chinyere’, ‘CAPS FC’, ‘CAPS United’, just to mention a few. Even Churches have not been spared: ‘Johhane Marange’, ‘Johanne Masowe yeChishanu’, ‘Johanne Masowe yeMadzibaba’ and ‘Johnane Masowe yeVadzidzi’. One wonders why these divisions are happening. Even in these seemly intact institutions, its normal to hear of ‘this faction’ and ‘that other faction’. Many times conflicts are unavoidable, but is separation always the best answer? In every set up since time immemorial, there has always been a provision for dispute settlement. Conflicts are not new in our lives, our failure to handle them should labeled as such: FAILURE.

And this does not only happen at institutional level, but even at social and family level, you find those that were strong bonds now being totally disjointed. Friends, who were friends, are no longer. Parents who shared everything including children are now enemies for life. It is high time that we stop this trend and resort to amicable dispute settling mechanisms, which do not culminate in divisions. We all know that there is power in unity and a unified body is more dignified that its sub-parts. Even the bible makes it clear that “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand” (Matthew 12:25). Even the Shona say that “Shumba mbiri hadzibvutirwi nyama,” which literally means that one cannot take away meat from two lions. Recognising this power of unity, and recalling past experiences were disunity has cost us, it should be a lesson to throw out division forever.

The question is, what kind of precedence are we are setting for our future generations, in terms of professionalism, leadership qualities, comradeship, brotherhood and unity of purpose? The bottom line here is to bring things together when we see them falling apart.

PlusNews Global, an arm of IRIN, reports on HIV/AIDS news and analysis. Here’s one of their recent articles on Zimbabwe:

Moses Mataka, 49, diagnosed with the HIV virus seven years ago, was one of the first male home-based caregivers working in the mining district of Mberengwa, in Midlands Province, Zimbabwe, and perhaps he was one of the first in the country, but his road has not been easy.

“I tested HIV positive in 2003. I had been very ill for a very long time … One day I had a dream that God asked me to get up and do his work. Before I could ask, ‘What kind of work?’ I woke up from the dream and I was feeling stronger. My wife was making porridge for me when I walked into the kitchen. She almost fainted with disbelief.

“From that day I have never been ill to the extent of lying in bed for days. When I thought hard about the dream, I knew that the work I needed to do was to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in my community and save people’s lives. This was very difficult because I also did not have much knowledge about it.

“That was the starting point. I joined a support group and trained as a peer educator; after that I joined a home-based care programme [which closed down in 2005].

“After its closure we didn’t know what to do and our patients were stranded. Although we had no support we continued visiting our clients, giving them moral support.

“After that I joined the Betseranai Home Based Care programme … where we use male caregivers to encourage other men to get tested and support their wives in the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT).

“Most women are afraid to go on this programme, because when the husbands find out they [the wives] are HIV positive they are chased away from the family home – they are blamed for bringing the disease into the home.

“This is the work I do as a “Male Champion”. We go and talk to men so that they understand what the benefits of PMTCT are, but it’s not an easy thing. Sometimes we are chased away from people’s homes; sometimes they close their doors in our faces, but we continue visiting them and trying to convince them.

“We men are just thick-headed – I know that for a fact. We take time to accept issues because we want to live in denial most of the time, but in Mberengwa, I tell you, we are changing mindsets. People are seeing the benefits of the PMTCT programme.”